Chain store forecast: Cooler weather on the way

TROPICAL DEPRESSION 8 FORMS, NO THREAT TO LAND: The season’s eighth tropical depression formed Wednesday at 5 p.m. in the Atlantic well north of the Antilles, and forecasters at the National Hurricane Center predicted it would become Tropical Storm Gordon on Thursday.

But the system was moving north and appeared to be no threat to land. It was expected to move east of Bermuda.

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ORIGINAL POST: We have turned the corner on temperature trends in Palm Beach and will find average highs edging down from now until mid-January. In this part of the world, of course, the turn-around is a slow, lazy loop that is unlikely to provide much noticeable relief from the heat until October.

But October is closer than you think, as I discovered yesterday at a major home improvement store when I passed a full-blown Halloween exhibit, complete with a shrieking witch, skeleton costumes and miniature haunted house.

Temperatures normally top out at a balmy 83 degrees on Halloween and drop at night to 69, cool enough for costume comfort and a little end-of-evening candy consumption.

Nature is subtle in this neck of the woods, though, and early season cooling trends are barely noticeable. The average high temperature tops out at 91 degrees on Aug. 7 and falls to 90 degrees on Aug. 8, where it languishes until Aug. 30, when it dips to 89. Average highs remain in the 80s until Nov. 20, and then they fall into the 70s. Just in time to give the oven a heavy workout two days later on Thanksgiving.

Contrary to public belief, there aren’t just two seasons in South Florida — off-season and tourist season, also known affectionately as The Season. There is in fact a spring, summer, fall and winter.

Palm Beach residents have felt the gentle tap of autumn as early as Sept. 22, 1897, when the low temperature plummeted to a relatively nippy 61 degrees.

Cold fronts do sometimes approach in September, but they are practically guaranteed in October. There was, in fact, a rather early autumn in 1920 with a record low temperature of 65 degrees on Sept. 6, a low of 66 degrees on Sept. 20, and a sweater-over-the-shoulder low of 55 degrees on Oct. 1.

The all-time record low in October for Palm Beach-West Palm Beach is 47 degrees on Oct. 23, 1923.

It may seem like the cool crisp air of autumn is an eon away, but not if you’re working in the back of the home improvement store, drawing diagrams of where the holiday displays will go and pulling the inflatable Santa Claus boxes off the top storage shelves.

And speaking of autumn, Canadian air has been angling for a mid-August bust-out and has the Upper Midwest in its sites. The low Tuesday in Hibbing, Minn. was 42 degrees, ditto for International Falls. Even Minneapolis is headed for a low of 50 degrees on Thursday night.

Tropical weather, meanwhile, still has South Florida in its grip. High temperatures through the weekend and into Tuesday will be at or near 90 degrees, with a 20-30 percent chance of showers and storms through the weekend, rising to 40 percent on Tuesday.

It does appear that we’ll see Tropical Depression 8, or Tropical Storm Gordon, in the Atlantic by the end of the week. National Hurricane Center forecasters are giving an area of showers and thunderstorms at about 30N 55W, designated Invest 93L by the NHC, an 80 percent chance of tropical development.

The good news is that the system is already moving north-northwest and is expected to turn toward the northeast on Thursday. It probably won’t affect any land areas at all, including Bermuda.

Invest 93L was becoming better organized Wednesday and could become a cyclone by Thursday. (Credit: Naval Research Lab)

Long-term, the reliable European forecast model shows no tropical development over the next 10 days. The GFS model predicts that a system will roll off the coast of Africa and develop in the Central Atlantic on Aug. 31. Destination: Unknown.